Rewrites

If an author writes a series over a long period of time, should he rewrite earlier instalments when they are republished? In Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven judged that his audience would prefer to read the unchanged texts. Leslie Charteris decided against revising Enter The Saint (1930) when it was republished in 1963. (After 1963, the next Saint novel was really written by Harry Harrison.)

Both Niven and Charteris are relevant to Poul Anderson, Niven because he is a fellow future historian, Charteris because both Charteris' Simon Templar, the Saint, and Anderson's David Falkayn used the alias, Sebastian Tombs, i.e., Anderson acknowledged Charteris.

In Anderson's Technic History, the first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," had to be rewritten to make it consistent with the series whereas I think that the early Dominic Flandry stories were rewritten merely as an improvement exercise. In any case, we value both the changed and the unchanged versions as long as we can continue to have access to both.

The two ways to read the Technic History are both with different reading orders and with different versions of some of the texts. Either way, the original version of "Margin of Profit" is outside the History. This story had already been rewritten when it was collected for the first time in The Earth Book of Stormgate.